Per-title encoding and dynamic encoding ladders

Student project, Bachelor- and Master Thesis

A sophisticated video encoding chain is a key factor for the successful delivery of media content over the internet. For a long time, the same encoding parameters were used for different types of content, resulting in a single static encoding ladder. However, as video content highly differs in terms of complexity and details, it is recommended to use custom encoding settings for individual media files. Depending on the characteristics of an asset the best encoding parameters are identified. As a result, an optimal video quality is achieved, while not wasting bandwidth.

Multicast Adaptive Bitrate Streaming

Student Project

Adaptive media streaming solutions adjust the quality of video and audio content depending on the current available bandwidth on the client. For that purpose, the content is encoded in different qualities and segmented into small chunks. Adaptive behavior is realized by appending chunks of different qualities.

Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) are standards to enable adaptive media streaming in the browser using conventional HTTP servers.

Participants of this project will work on adaptive media streaming and IP multicast related technology. Potential topics include the design and implementation of ABR streaming over IP multicast, integration with existing open source players like dash.js and shaka-player and seamless switching between unicast and multicast.

Peer-to-Peer Streaming with WebRTC

Student Project

Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) are standards to enable adaptive media streaming in the browser using conventional HTTP servers.

WebRTC enables to create a P2P network for traffic sharing between clients for the same media content. This potentially reduces traditional CDN traffic and improves scalability.

Participants of this project will work on adaptive media streaming and P2P related technology. Topics include the design and implementation of P2P streaming demo and integration with existing open source players like dash.js and shaka-player

Progressive Web Apps for Media Streaming

Student project

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) technology bring apps hat are built using Web technologies closer to native apps. Deployment of Web apps across devices is eased, because of standardized APIs.

For example, on mobile platforms (e.g. iOS or Android) PWAs can be added to the home screen with the help of Web App Manifests; on Windows, PWAs can be submitted to the Microsoft Store. Using Service Workers API and Indexed DB, offline playback capability can be enabled. Performance can be improved with the help of Web Workers.

Your Tasks:

Develop an interoperable PWA for media playback, which includes a catalogue and media player (e.g. dash.js or shaka-player)

Research and develop download and offline playback functionality for adaptive streams

Experimentation with WebAssembly

Student project

WebAssembly or "wasm" is a portable, low-level programming language for in-browser execution to complement JavaScript. Initially, C/C++ is supported. It aims at enabling high performance applications on the Web and is currently being designed as an open standard by a W3C Community Group.

New opportunities arise for media-related use cases such as video transcoding and manipulation in the Web browser using WebAssembly.

Your Tasks:

Understand the specification and relationship to asm.js and Emscripten

Experimentation with Blockchain for Media

Student project

Blockchain seems to be a promising technology for rights management and micro payments between users without a central entity. In blockchain architecture, transactions are stored in a public, distributed ledger. When a new transaction is made, it needs to be verified by the decentralized network. This promises to bring transparency, security and efficiency to transactions.

In this project Blockchain technology shall be applied to server-less media streaming. A proof of concept implementation shall be in the scope of the project.

Image and Video context determination

Student Project

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the fastest growing technologies of our time. It is considered by Google CEO Sundar Pichai as “more important to humanity than fire or electricity”. The aim of this project is to evaluate the ability of todays’ available AI tools and techniques to analyze images and videos in order to determine their context.

Your tasks:

Research, understand and evaluate related work on AI tools and techniques that enable generation of image and video tags and determination of context

Implement a demo application using one of the currently available solutions